The Peloponnesian War
Thucydides watched Athens destroy itself, and wrote both sides
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Say the Peloponnesian War and people picture two armies settling it with spears. Athens against Sparta, one winner left standing.
The record does not show that. Sparta burned Athenian farmland almost every summer for years, and Athens simply would not come out to fight.
What finally broke Athens was not a battle at all. And when Sparta won, it did not win as the better army. It won with Persian gold, from the same power the two of them had once united to drive out of Greece.
Scene 1Plataea, summer of four thirty one BCE
Three hundred men from Thebes slip into the city of Plataea at night, let in by a faction inside the walls. The Plataeans wake, realize how few of them there are, and by morning have killed or captured a hundred eighty.
Thebes is Sparta's ally. Plataea is Athens's ally. In a Greek world of hundreds of independent cities, that is now a reason for everyone else to go to war.
Scene 2Behind the Long Walls
Athens controls the sea: three hundred warships, each needing a hundred seventy rowers, and an empire of about a hundred fifty tribute paying cities. Sparta controls the land, with eight to ten thousand citizens trained from age seven, the most feared infantry in Greece.
So each side attacks where the other is weak. Sparta burns Athenian farmland every year, and Athens does not march out to meet them.
Instead Athens shelters behind two long walls connecting the city to its port five miles away and imports its grain by ship. Pericles, the statesman running the strategy, has calculated that the city can outlast Sparta's invasions as long as it never risks a pitched battle on land.
Scene 3The winter of four thirty one
The first year's war dead are buried, and Pericles gives the funeral speech.
He tells the crowd that Athens copies no one, that it is a pattern for others rather than an imitator of anyone.
To the widows in the crowd he adds one instruction: a woman's greatest glory is to be talked about by men as little as possible, for praise or for blame.
The speech survives only because Thucydides wrote it up himself, decades afterward, in his own words rather than a record of what was actually said that day.
Scene 4The plague
A year later, in four thirty BCE, disease breaks out in the overcrowded city. It is still debated whether it was typhoid fever or smallpox.
Over four years it kills an estimated one quarter of the population. Pericles himself dies of it in four twenty nine BCE.
Thucydides catches the plague too, and survives. He writes down what he saw with the same precision he uses for battles.
This is Thucydides describing the city during the outbreak.
· History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.52 · c. 400 BCE
“The city was full of dead bodies lying where they died, one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeling about the streets and gathering round all the fountains in their longing for water.”
Pericles's plan was never beaten in the field. It was beaten by a fever, and it took the man who designed it along with a quarter of the city.
What Thucydides wrote down that year is the oldest detailed account of an epidemic in Western literature.
Scene 5Melos, four sixteen BCE
Athens sends thirty eight ships, three thousand hoplites and three hundred archers to a small neutral island called Melos, and tells it to submit or be destroyed.
Melos is a colony of Sparta, but it has stayed neutral the whole war. The Melians say they have harmed no one, that neutrality is their right, and that the gods and Sparta will protect them.
Thucydides was not in the room for this negotiation. He reconstructed it afterward as a dialogue, and gives the Athenian envoys this answer.
· History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 5, the Melian Dialogue · Written around four hundred BCE, describing events of four sixteen BCE
“The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.”
Sparta never comes. The Melians refuse anyway, and Athens takes the island.
What follows is not a battle Athens lost. It is a policy Athens carried out, calculated in advance, against an island that had attacked no one.
Scene 6The Great Harbor, four thirteen BCE
A year after Melos, Athens launches the largest operation in Greek history, a hundred thirty four ships and about thirty thousand men, to conquer Syracuse.
Its champion, Alcibiades, is recalled on the way to face charges of sacrilege and defects to Sparta instead. Without him the campaign stalls, and Syracuse, reinforced by a Spartan general, destroys the Athenian fleet in the harbor and wipes out the retreating army at a river.
Of the forty thousand who sailed, a few thousand come home. The captured die of disease and exposure in stone quarries.
Scene 7Aegospotami, four oh five BCE
Athens fights on nine more years, rebuilding its navy twice, but it cannot outlast what Sparta finds next. Sparta takes gold from Persia and pays for it by handing the Greek cities of Ionia back to Persian control.
Lysander, Sparta's most effective admiral, uses that money to build the fleet that destroys Athens's last ships at Aegospotami.
Athens surrenders the following year. Sparta tears down the Long Walls and installs a regime that executes fifteen hundred Athenians in eight months before it is overthrown.
Five accounts
Five accounts survive this war, and none of them agree on what it was actually for.
vanquishedAthenian / Democratic-Imperial
Athenian / Democratic-Imperial
Athens's own case starts with what the empire paid for. Tribute from about a hundred fifty allied cities paid the rowers of the fleet, and those rowers were the poorer citizens whose vote made Athens a democracy. Take away the empire and the base under that democracy goes with it.
Pericles did not pretend the empire was innocent. This is a speech he gave to the assembly, as rendered by Thucydides, not a transcript of his exact words.
“Your empire is now like a tyranny. It may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.”
On this account the plague broke a sound plan, not a strategic mistake, and Sicily was not inevitable either. The assembly voted for that war on a wave of enthusiasm with no institution able to slow it down.
Even after Sicily, Athens rebuilt its fleet twice and kept winning battles for nine more years. It was also the only Greek city that restored its own democracy after the Thirty Tyrants fell.
Read the full account
Narrative
The Athenian perspective, as Thucydides reconstructed it, was defined by the tension between democratic ideals and imperial necessity. Pericles articulated this tension in the Funeral Oration of 431 BCE, a speech delivered over the bodies of the first year's war dead. The oration is the most famous defense of democracy in ancient literature. "Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states," Pericles declared. "We are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves." Athens was open where Sparta was closed; democratic where Sparta was oligarchic; cosmopolitan where Sparta was xenophobic. Athenian culture (the tragedies of Sophocles, the philosophy of Socrates, the architecture of the Parthenon) was produced by a system that gave citizens voice. The oration's closing line to the widows in attendance defined the boundary of that voice: "the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticizing you." Democracy extended to adult male citizens. Women, slaves, and metics, who together were the majority of Attica's population, were excluded.
But Pericles also told the Athenians a harder truth. "Your empire is now like a tyranny," he said in a later speech. "It may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go." The Delian League had begun in 478 BCE as a voluntary alliance against Persia. By the 440s, it was an empire. Athens moved the League treasury from Delos to the Acropolis in 454 BCE and used the tribute of 600 talents annually from roughly 150 allied cities to build the Parthenon. Members who tried to leave were crushed: Naxos in 470 BCE, Thasos in 465 BCE, Samos in 440 BCE. The empire funded the democracy. The rowing crews of the trireme fleet (free citizens of the lower class, the thetes) were paid from imperial revenue. Remove the empire, and the economic basis of democratic participation collapsed.
The Sicily expedition revealed the democracy's structural weakness: the assembly could vote for war on a wave of enthusiasm, without the institutional checks that might restrain ambition. Thucydides recorded that the Athenians voted overwhelmingly for the expedition with "a passionate desire to sail" (eros), and that most had no idea how large Sicily was or how many peoples inhabited it. Nicias, the reluctant general assigned to lead the expedition, tried to discourage the assembly by demanding an absurdly large force. The assembly voted to give him everything he asked for. The democracy's very responsiveness to popular desire became the mechanism of its destruction.
After the catastrophe in Sicily, Athens survived nine more years through extraordinary resilience: rebuilding its fleet, winning victories at Cyzicus (410) and Arginusae (406), and fighting with a fraction of its former resources. During the Plague of Athens (430-426 BCE), Thucydides recorded that women who nursed the sick died disproportionately (2.51). By 411 BCE, war-weariness had grown severe enough that Aristophanes staged Lysistrata, a comedy in which Athenian and Spartan women seize the Acropolis treasury and withhold sex to force their husbands to negotiate peace. The play was comedy, not politics, but it drew on real conditions: women managed household economies that were collapsing under twenty years of war. The end came not from a single defeat but from exhaustion. Lysander's destruction of the fleet at Aegospotami cut off the grain supply from the Black Sea. Athens surrendered under siege in 404 BCE. The Long Walls were torn down to the sound of flute music. The Thirty Tyrants ruled for eight months before Thrasybulus led a democratic restoration. Athens was the only Greek city to restore democracy after oligarchic overthrow. But the empire was gone, and with it the economic foundation that had supported the golden age.
Arguments
- Athenian democracy and Athenian empire were inseparable; imperial revenue funded democratic participation
- Pericles's defensive strategy was sound; the plague, not strategic error, undermined the first phase
- The Sicily expedition demonstrated the danger of democratic decision-making in matters of war. Popular enthusiasm overwhelmed strategic judgment
- Athens's resilience after Sicily (rebuilding the fleet twice, winning battles, surviving nine more years) is as remarkable as the defeat itself
Sources
victorSpartan / Peloponnesian League
Spartan / Peloponnesian League
Sparta's case is that this was a war to restore the balance of power, not one of conquest. Corinth and Megara complained that Athens was strangling their trade, and the Spartan assembly voted for war on a single argument: Athens had grown too powerful.
Thucydides himself agreed that was the real reason underneath the official one.
“The growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta made war inevitable.”
Spartan strength came from a system built to produce nothing else: boys entered training at seven and lived in barracks until thirty, while a subject population, the helots, worked the land so Spartan men never had to.
Victory came at a price Sparta paid quietly: it needed Persian gold to finish the job, and Persian gold meant handing Ionia's Greek cities back to the empire Sparta had once helped drive out.
Read the full account
Narrative
Sparta fought the Peloponnesian War as a war of liberation, or so its declared war aim stated. The Spartan assembly voted for war in 432 BCE after allies, particularly Corinth and Megara, complained that Athens was strangling their commerce and violating the terms of the Thirty Years' Peace (446 BCE). King Archidamus II warned that the war would last longer than anyone expected and that Sparta's advantage in land warfare meant nothing against a maritime empire. He was overruled by the ephor Sthenelaidas, who cut the debate short with a single argument: Athens had become too powerful, and the balance of power in Greece had to be restored. Thucydides identified this as the war's "truest cause": "the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta."
Sparta's military superiority on land was absolute. The Spartan hoplite, trained from age seven, was the product of the most extreme social engineering in the ancient world. Boys entered the agoge at seven, were grouped into herds (agelai), slept on reed mats, ate black broth, and were flogged at the altar of Artemis Orthia as a test of endurance. At twenty, they joined a mess group (syssition) and lived in barracks until age thirty. They trained full-time for war while a subject population (the helots of Messenia and Laconia, enslaved by Sparta centuries earlier) worked the land. The ratio of helots to Spartiates may have been as high as 7:1. This demographic reality shaped Spartan strategy: the army could not campaign far from home for long, because a helot revolt was an ever-present danger. The great helot uprising of 464 BCE, which took ten years to suppress, was within living memory.
The war forced Sparta into unfamiliar territory. Brasidas, the most innovative Spartan commander, broke the strategic stalemate by campaigning in Thrace in 424-422 BCE, threatening Athens's grain supply and peeling away allies. He was killed at Amphipolis in 422 BCE (along with the Athenian demagogue Cleon, who died in the same battle) and was honored with a hero cult by the people he had liberated from Athens. Brasidas demonstrated what a Spartan commander could achieve outside the Peloponnese, but his initiative alarmed Sparta's own conservative leadership, which distrusted individual ambition.
Sparta's victory in 404 BCE was achieved through a devil's bargain. Lysander secured Persian gold (subsidies from Cyrus the Younger, a Persian prince) to build the fleet that destroyed Athens at Aegospotami. The price was the abandonment of the Greek cities of Ionia, the same cities that Sparta and Athens had united to liberate from Persia in 480-479 BCE. Sparta won the war by allying with the old enemy and selling out the cities whose freedom had justified the Greek resistance to Persia a lifetime earlier.
Victory exposed Sparta's limitations. The Thirty Tyrants it installed in Athens were overthrown within eight months. Spartan garrisons across Greece provoked resentment, not gratitude. Lysander's personal ambition threatened the dual-kingship system. Within a decade, Sparta's former allies Corinth, Thebes, and Argos formed a coalition against it in the Corinthian War (395-387 BCE). Within three decades, Thebes under Epaminondas defeated Sparta at Leuctra (371 BCE), invaded the Peloponnese, and liberated the Messenian helots, destroying the economic foundation of the Spartan system forever. Sparta won the war and lost the peace.
Arguments
- Sparta fought to restore the balance of power in Greece; Athenian imperial expansion threatened the independence of all Greek states
- Spartan military superiority was the product of the most rigorous training system in the ancient world, sustained by helot labor
- Victory required Persian gold and the abandonment of Ionian Greeks, a moral compromise that undermined the war's stated purpose
- Sparta won the war but proved unable to manage the peace; its hegemony collapsed within 33 years
Sources
- Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300-362 BC
- The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece
- A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
vanquishedSubject Peoples / The Melian Position
Subject Peoples / The Melian Position
Most of the Greek world was neither Athens nor Sparta. Something like seven hundred fifty independent cities, most with fewer than five thousand people, left almost no record of what this war did to them.
Melos survives because Thucydides chose to write it down, reconstructing the negotiation as a dialogue between the Athenian envoys and the Melians.
“Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.”
Melos was not the only case. Mytilene revolted in four twenty eight BCE, and the assembly voted to execute every man and enslave the rest, then reconsidered a day later, though a thousand judged ringleaders were still executed. Scione got no second vote at all.
Sparta was no kinder to the cities it captured. At Plataea, captured survivors were asked one question each: had they helped Sparta in the war. When the answer was no, as it always was after a siege, the man was executed. Two hundred Plataeans and twenty five Athenians died that way, and Thebes tore the city down afterward.
For the small cities caught between them, the lesson was the same whichever side you asked: neither great power respected the independence of the weak.
Read the full account
Narrative
The Peloponnesian War, as Thucydides recorded it, was overwhelmingly a story told by the two great powers. The roughly 750 independent poleis of the Greek world, most with populations under 5,000, had no Thucydides to record their experience. The Melian Dialogue, the most famous passage in Thucydides's History, survives precisely because Thucydides chose to record the voice of a small state being destroyed, and because the Athenian response articulated the logic of power that small states have faced in every century since.
In 416 BCE, Athens sent 38 ships, 3,000 hoplites, and 300 archers to Melos, a small island in the southern Aegean with a population of perhaps 1,500 citizens. Melos was a Spartan colony that had maintained neutrality throughout the war. Athens demanded submission and tribute. The Melians argued that they had harmed no one, that neutrality was their right, that the gods would protect the just, and that Sparta would come to their aid. The Athenian envoys dismissed every argument. Justice, they said, "is only in question between equals in power." The gods, if they existed, followed the same law as men: "of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can." Sparta would not come. The Melians refused to submit. Athens besieged the island for six months, then executed every adult male and enslaved the women and children.
After the siege, Athens executed every adult male on Melos and sold the women and children into slavery (Thucydides 5.116). The fates diverged by sex: men were killed; women and children became property, dispersed across Aegean slave markets with no record of where they were sent.
Melos was not unique. Mytilene, a member of the Delian League on the island of Lesbos, revolted in 428 BCE. After its recapture, the Athenian assembly voted to execute all adult males and enslave the rest. The next day, they reconsidered. Barely. A second ship was sent to countermand the order, arriving hours before the first decree would have been carried out. But 1,000 men identified as ringleaders were still executed. Scione, a city in Chalcidice, revolted in 423 BCE; when Athens recaptured it in 421 BCE, all adult males were killed and women and children enslaved. Thucydides recorded the Scione decree with the same clinical detachment he applied to the plague.
Sparta's record was no better. After capturing Plataea in 427 BCE, the same city whose attack had started the war, the Spartans put the surviving garrison on trial. Each man was asked one question: "Have you done anything to help the Spartans or their allies in the present war?" When the answer was no (as it inevitably was, since Plataea had been under siege), the man was executed. Two hundred Plataeans and 25 Athenians were killed. The women were enslaved. Thebes demolished the city.
The war's impact on the non-combatant Greek world was devastating in ways that Thucydides documented but did not foreground. Civil wars (stasis) broke out across the Greek world as democratic and oligarchic factions within cities aligned with Athens and Sparta respectively. In Corcyra (427 BCE), the stasis killed hundreds as neighbors settled scores under the cover of ideological alignment. Thucydides described the Corcyrean revolution as the prototype of a pattern that spread across Greece: "Words changed their ordinary meaning. Reckless audacity was held to be loyal courage; prudent hesitation was the excuse of a coward; moderation was a cloak for weakness; frantic violence became the attribute of manliness." The passage has been cited by observers of civil wars from the French Revolution to Syria.
For the small states, the lesson of the Peloponnesian War was that neither great power respected the independence of the weak. Athens crushed neutrals who refused tribute. Sparta abandoned allies who became inconvenient. Persia bankrolled whichever side offered the better deal. The Greek world that emerged from the war was exhausted, depopulated, and demoralized, incapable of resisting the Macedonian conquest that came within two generations.
Arguments
- The Melian Dialogue is the foundational text on the powerlessness of small states in a system dominated by great powers
- Neither Athens nor Sparta respected the sovereignty of smaller poleis; both used ideology (democracy, liberation) as cover for coercion
- Civil war (stasis) within cities, driven by great-power intervention, killed as many Greeks as the battles themselves
- The war destroyed the independence of the Greek polis system, preparing the way for Macedonian conquest
Sources
- The Melian Dialogue: Thucydides, Book 5.84-116
- Thucydides and the Idea of History
- War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica
- Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
academicModern Realist / International Relations Theory
Modern Realist / International Relations Theory
Thucydides did not just record this war. He built a framework for reading power politics that outlived him by thousands of years. Graham Allison's two thousand seventeen book named the pattern the Thucydides Trap: in sixteen historical cases where a rising power challenged a ruling one, war followed in twelve of them. By the twenty tens, Allison's framing had made Thucydides the most cited ancient author in Pentagon briefings.
The Melian Dialogue is the proof text realists still teach, because Thucydides refuses to editorialize. He lays out the Melian argument and the Athenian argument side by side and lets the destruction of Melos answer the question itself.
Thucydides said what he was doing, in his own words, about his own book.
“My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.”
Read the full account
Narrative
Thucydides did not merely record the Peloponnesian War. He invented a way of analyzing political conflict that international relations scholars have used for 2,400 years. His History is the foundational text of realism, the school of thought that holds that states operate in an anarchic system where power, not justice, determines outcomes. Every generation of strategists has read Thucydides and found its own wars reflected in his pages.
The concept of the "Thucydides Trap" entered mainstream discourse through Graham Allison's 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? Allison argued that in 16 cases over the past 500 years where a rising power challenged a ruling power, war resulted in 12. The pattern (structural pressure toward conflict between an established hegemon and a rising challenger) mirrors Thucydides's diagnosis of the "truest cause" of the Peloponnesian War: "the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." Allison's framing made Thucydides the most-cited ancient author in Pentagon briefings and National Security Council memos of the 2010s and 2020s.
The realist reading of the Peloponnesian War emphasizes structural forces over individual agency. It was not Pericles's death, or Alcibiades's treason, or the plague that determined the outcome. It was the distribution of power in a bipolar system. Robert Gilpin's War and Change in World Politics (1981) used the Athenian case to argue that hegemonic powers expand until the costs of maintaining their empire exceed the benefits, at which point the system becomes unstable. Athens's reach exceeded its grasp in Sicily; the system corrected. Hans Morgenthau, the founding figure of American realism, drew on Thucydides to argue that the pursuit of power is a constant in human affairs, that democratic Athens was no less imperial than autocratic Sparta, because the imperatives of security in an anarchic world override domestic political form.
The Melian Dialogue is the realist proof text. Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, and their students all cite it. The Athenians' argument (that justice exists only between equals in power, and that the strong rule where they can) is the distilled axiom of realist theory. What makes the Dialogue effective as a teaching text is that Thucydides did not editorialize. He presented the Melian argument (justice, the gods, Spartan aid) and the Athenian argument (power, necessity, the irrelevance of morality) and let the reader judge. The Melians were destroyed. The passage functions as a case study in which the reader discovers, through the Melians' destruction, whether moral arguments constrain great powers. The answer, for realists, is no.
But the realist reading has its own blind spots. Thucydides wrote as a participant, not an objective observer. He was an Athenian general, exiled for losing a battle. His sympathies, while controlled, were not absent. The speeches he attributed to Pericles are more eloquent than those given to any Spartan; the Funeral Oration has no Spartan equivalent. His analysis foregrounded interstate competition and minimized economic factors, class conflict, and the experience of non-citizens: women, slaves, and metics (resident aliens), who constituted the majority of Athens's population. The realist appropriation of Thucydides takes his framework as universal truth rather than as the perspective of a displaced Athenian aristocrat writing in exile, shaped by his own losses.
Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (1975) opened a line of inquiry that Thucydides's realist inheritors have largely ignored: the war's impact on the majority of Athens's population who could not vote, speak in the assembly, or hold command. Thucydides mentions women exactly twice in the Funeral Oration: once to praise the mothers of the dead, once to instruct the widows to be silent. The plague narrative (2.51) notes women dying as caregivers but assigns them no agency. Aristophanes' Lysistrata (411 BCE) and Assemblywomen (392 BCE) satirize women seizing political and economic power, which means women's exclusion from both was visible enough to be comic material. The realist tradition built on Thucydides inherits his silences along with his insights.
The deepest irony is methodological. Thucydides invented multi-perspective history. He put speeches in the mouths of both sides: Pericles AND the Corinthians, the Athenians AND the Melians, the hawks AND the doves. He did this not because he believed all positions were equally valid, but because he believed that understanding conflict required hearing how each side justified itself. void --history operates on the same principle. The method is Thucydidean. The difference is that Thucydides was one man selecting which perspectives to present; void --history makes the selection transparent and the perspectives independently sourced.
Arguments
- Thucydides identified the structural cause of great-power conflict (the rising power / ruling power dynamic) that remains the dominant framework in international relations
- The 'Thucydides Trap' is applied to contemporary U.S.-China competition, making a 2,400-year-old text directly policy-relevant
- The Melian Dialogue is the foundational text of political realism; power, not justice, determines outcomes in the international system
- Thucydides invented multi-perspective history: he presented both sides' arguments and let the reader judge
Sources
- Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
- War and Change in World Politics
- Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader
- Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
vanquishedNon-Athenian Greek Cities / Subject Allies
Non-Athenian Greek Cities / Subject Allies
The Delian League started in four seventy eight BCE as a voluntary alliance against Persia. By the fourteen fifties it was an Athenian empire in every way that mattered. Athens moved the League's treasury from Delos to the Acropolis and spent the tribute, six hundred talents a year from about a hundred fifty cities, on the Parthenon.
Cities that tried to leave were crushed. Naxos was besieged and forced back around four seventy BCE. Thasos revolted in four sixty five and lost its gold mines. Samos rebelled in four forty, and Pericles personally led the nine month siege that broke it.
Thucydides recorded exactly what Athens did at Melos when it was finished with the island.
“The Athenians took the city, put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves. They then colonized Melos with five hundred settlers of their own.”
The allies paid for the ships, rowed the ships, and died on campaigns from Egypt to Sicily, with no vote in the assembly that decided how any of it was spent.
Read the full account
Narrative
The envoys from Athens arrived at Melos in the summer of 416 BCE. Their message was simple: join the Athenian empire or be destroyed. The Melians were a small island community, a Spartan colony that had maintained neutrality throughout the war. They had attacked no one. They asked only to be left alone. The Athenian envoys dismissed every argument: justice, gods, tradition. "The strong do what they can," they told the Melians. "The weak suffer what they must." The Melians refused to submit. Athens besieged the island for the winter. In the spring of 415, the Melians surrendered. Athens executed every adult male and sold every woman and child into slavery. Then it colonized the empty island with 500 Athenian settlers.
Melos was not an exception. It was the logic of the Delian League stripped of pretense. The League had been founded in 478 BCE as a voluntary alliance against Persia. By the 450s, it was an empire. Athens moved the common treasury from Delos to the Acropolis in 454, using allied tribute, 600 talents annually from roughly 150 cities, to build the Parthenon. The monument that symbolizes democracy was financed by imperial extraction. When Naxos attempted to leave the League around 470 BCE, Athens besieged it and forced it back. Thasos revolted in 465; Athens crushed it and confiscated its gold mines. Samos rebelled in 440; Pericles personally commanded the nine-month siege that brought it to heel.
The allies paid, rowed, and died. Athenian triremes required 170 oarsmen each; the allied cities supplied both ships and crews. Allied soldiers fought in Athenian campaigns from Egypt to Sicily. The tribute lists, carved on stone stelae on the Acropolis and partially surviving, record payments from Aegina, Lesbos, Chios, Byzantium, and dozens of smaller communities. The tribute was assessed by Athens, collected by Athenian officials, and spent by the Athenian assembly. The allies had no vote in the assembly that decided how their money was used.
Mytilene on Lesbos revolted in 428 BCE. Athens suppressed the revolt and debated the punishment. Cleon, the demagogue, persuaded the assembly to execute all adult men and enslave the women and children. A trireme was dispatched with the order. The next day, the assembly reconsidered. Diodotus argued not for mercy but for pragmatism: killing the population would destroy a valuable asset and encourage other allies to fight to the death rather than surrender. A second trireme was sent, rowing through the night to arrive before the execution order could be carried out. It arrived just in time. The thousand ringleaders were executed instead. The reprieve was not clemency. It was accounting.
Scione, a small city on the Pallene peninsula, revolted during a truce between Athens and Sparta in 423 BCE. Cleon again proposed the execution of all men and enslavement of all women and children. This time, there was no second vote. When Athens captured Scione in 421, the sentence was carried out. The women and children were sold. The land was given to Plataean refugees, themselves victims of Spartan brutality, now beneficiaries of Athenian brutality against others.
Thucydides recorded these events because he understood their meaning: Athens, the champion of liberty against Persia, had become the thing it claimed to oppose. The war was experienced by the smaller cities of the Greek world not as a contest between rival systems but as a catastrophe inflicted by both. Spartan armies burned their fields; Athenian fleets demanded their tribute and their obedience. Neutrality was not permitted. Independence was punished. The Peloponnesian War was not two powers fighting each other. It was two powers grinding the smaller cities between them.
Arguments
- The Delian League began as a voluntary alliance against Persia and became an Athenian empire by the 450s
- Melos, Scione, and Mytilene demonstrate that Athens punished neutrality and revolt with massacre and enslavement
- Allied cities paid tribute, supplied crews, and fought in Athens's wars without any voice in Athenian decision-making
- The war was experienced by smaller cities as imperial violence from both sides; neither Athens nor Sparta offered freedom
Sources
- History of the Peloponnesian War
- The Athenian Empire
- Thucydides and the Idea of History: Between Science and Literature
The turn
Each account leaves out what would complicate it.
Athenian / Democratic-Imperial
The Athenian account explains the democracy the empire funded, and says far less about Naxos, Thasos and Samos, the allied cities crushed for trying to leave that same empire.
From the record
Athenian brutality toward subject allies at Melos, Mytilene, and ScioneThe empire's coercive foundation: allied cities that tried to leave were crushedReliance on slave labor: Athens's silver mines at Laurion depended on 20,000-30,000 enslaved workersWomen's exclusion from democratic participation; Pericles's Funeral Oration explicitly defined female virtue as silenceSpartan / Peloponnesian League
The Spartan account calls this a war of liberation, and says less about the helots enslaved at home to make that liberation army possible, or about the Persian gold it needed to finally win.
From the record
The helot system, Sparta's own subject population, enslaved and terrorized through the krypteia (secret police)The Melian precedent in reverse: Sparta punished disloyal allies as harshly as Athens didPersian alliance as betrayal of pan-Hellenic idealsSubject Peoples / The Melian Position
The Melian account is the clearest indictment of great power politics in the whole record, and it says nothing about how small cities also formed alliances and played Athens and Sparta against each other when it suited them.
From the record
Cases where great-power intervention benefited small states, Brasidas's liberation of Amphipolis, for instanceThe agency of small states in forming alliances and playing great powers against each otherThe degree to which Thucydides shaped the Melian Dialogue as a literary construction rather than a factual transcriptModern Realist / International Relations Theory
The realist account treats the Melian Dialogue as timeless proof, and skips past the fact that Thucydides wrote both sides of it, an exiled Athenian aristocrat choosing which words went where. He gives Pericles better speeches than any Spartan, and women appear twice in the whole Funeral Oration: as mothers of the dead, and as widows told to stay quiet.
From the record
Thucydides's own biases as an exiled Athenian aristocrat, not an impartial observerEconomic, class, and gender dimensions that Thucydides minimized and realists inherit; women appear in his text as victims (plague), property (Melos), or as subjects of instruction to be silent (Funeral Oration)Non-Western traditions of historical analysis that developed independently of ThucydidesNon-Athenian Greek Cities / Subject Allies
And the allied account, which names the massacres in the most detail, still passes over the times allied cities preferred Athenian protection to the alternative, or benefited from choosing a side at all.
From the record
Athenian democratic culture and intellectual achievement that the empire fundedThe genuine Persian threat that originally justified the alliancePeriods of genuine cooperation and benefit within the LeagueSome allies who preferred Athenian hegemony to the alternatives; Sparta's allies also suffered under its control
Close
In four eleven BCE, twenty years into a war that would run seven more, the playwright Aristophanes staged a comedy about ending it.
In it, the women of Athens and Sparta seize the treasury on the Acropolis and refuse their husbands until the men agree to make peace.
It was a comedy. Households across the city really were collapsing, and it still took Athens another seven years to stop.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 27 yrs431-404 BCE
- Killed
- No reliable aggregate figure; the…
- Displaced
- 2-4MThe entire Greek world, an estimated people across…
- Place
- Greece
Key figures
- PericlesAthenian statesman and strategos; architect of Athens's defensive strategy; died in the plague of 429 BCE494 to 429
- ThucydidesAthenian general turned historian; exiled for losing Amphipolis in 424 BCE; wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, the foundational text of Western historiography460 to 395
- AlcibiadesAthenian statesman who championed the Sicily expedition, defected to Sparta, then to Persia, then returned to Athens; embodied the democratic system's instability450 to 404
- LysanderSpartan navarch who secured Persian funding, destroyed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami (405 BCE), and imposed the Thirty Tyrants? to -395
- BrasidasSpartan general who broke the mold of cautious Spartan strategy by campaigning aggressively in Thrace; killed at Amphipolis in 422 BCE500 to 422
- Aspasia of MiletusCompanion of Pericles, intellectual whose influence on Athenian politics Aristophanes satirized and Plato honored-470 to -400
Primary sources
· History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 5 (the Melian Dialogue) · Written c. 400 BCE, describing events of 416 BCE
“The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.”
· History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 1.22 · c. 400 BCE
“It is a possession for all time, not a prize composition to be heard for the moment.”
· History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.43 (Pericles's Funeral Oration) · Written c. 400 BCE, describing events of 431 BCE
“The whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
· History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.52 (description of the Plague of Athens) · c. 400 BCE
“The city was full of dead bodies lying where they died, one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeling about the streets and gathering round all the fountains in their longing for water.”
Threads
- The Conquests of AlexanderHe named 20 cities after himself and one after his horse.
- The French RevolutionA Parisian laborer spent 88% of his wages on bread. On July 14, the crowd took 30,000 muskets. The Bastille fell by dinner.
- The Fall of the Berlin WallAt 6:53 p.m. on November 9, 1989, a spokesman misread a memo on live television. The Wall fell by midnight.